A simple yet remarkably powerful tool of selfish and malicious participants in a distributed system is “equivocation”: making conflicting statements to others. Multiple techniques exist to combat the ability of participants to effectively equivocate within distributed systems. For instance, envision that a distributed system consists of participants “A”, “B”, and “C”. Here, when Participant C sends a message to Participant A, Participant A may ask Participant B if, in the past, Participant C has sent a conflicting message to Participant B. If Participant B answers in the affirmative, then Participant A may determine that Participant C is untrustworthy, and may remove Participant C from the view of Participant A. While these and other existing techniques prove effective, more efficient techniques may exist.